Sunday, 17 December 2017

Man, might have been a woman, twisted strands of grasses together and made twine for the first time. Cording was invented. The twine made was used to tie sticks together, then longer lengths of it woven together to make coiled baskets. Where grasses were not so abundant other plant materials were used such as bamboo in Asia, willow in Europe or palm fronds in the Pacific. With the use of different materials, techniques were adapted to make the most of these such as plaiting, stake and stand and numerous other weaving techniques from basketry to textiles.

The use of baskets was revolutionary. With their use, communities were able to switch from hunting and gathering to a more agrarian and sedentary way of life. For the first time food stuff, grain and other goods could now be stored, transported and exchanged; basketry (and making twine) led to advent of trade and commerce.'

- inspired by a conversation with Eva Sajovic talking about reason for wanting to show a large piece of rope made from corded waste plastic at Danielle Arnaud Gallery next year, as well as Barry Flanagan's work currently exhibited in the Duveen Gallery, Tate Britain.

Sunday, 10 December 2017

Let's celebrate the plastic for its tenacity, strength, adaptability and audacity! It's a modern symbol of survival and longevity, a material best suited to its environment, encroaching on all other life forms. Years from now, when a new generation of bio engineered materials supercede plastics (and providing humanity survives period) objects made from it will fill museums and archeologists, material anthropologists and curators will make it their subject of study.

Never did a material impact so greatly on life on our planet, clay soon will be forgotten.

Wednesday, 5 July 2017

Above and below are step by step
instruction showing you how to cord. These are to be included in a forthcoming publication
featuring a project of mine, part of Cultuur maak(t) je, a programme of event
and exhibitions at De Domijnen curated
by Joanna van der Zanden and Jeanne Van Heeswijk. More info on the project
here.

Natural fibres would traditionally be
used to cord yarn or twine but recycled plastic bags, cut into strips, would be
ideal for this too - see previous
post. Have fun experimenting with this while doing your bit to save our
oceans from plastic pollution.

Sunday, 2 July 2017

I’ve been thinking about it for a
while, and now I’m finally doing it: no plastic bags will recycled here
anymore. I’m keeping them all and making them into twine, which I’ll knit,
weave or crochet into large thermal blankets, hammocks or new installation
pieces. I'll also take inspiration from work produce and illustrated in this
previous post. I'm having a bash at 'zero waste' and I’m not recycling
anymore. I’m repurposing instead!

What I’ll do with hard plastic food
packaging need to be given some thought now. The house and studio meainwhile
will start to fill with these specialty fashion twines. Pretty, but how I break
the news to my partner is yet another matter!

Thursday, 29 June 2017

People’s Bureau were
invited to contribute to Milton Keynes of the Mind: What does it mean to
have a whole new town in mind? For the festival, we planned a screening of Unearthing
Elephant, following a recent showing at the Elephant and Castle shopping centre
and Tate Exchange. We also planned to lead an activity throughout the day; ‘Shopping
for an Imaginarium’ involved mapping out new spaces through stitch, drawing and
conversations. Images illustrated here are of the work produced on the day.

Programme information for
Milton Keynes of the Mind included the following:

This event
explores what goes into making a city that doesn’t exist. Plans for new towns
like Milton Keynes were closely tied to economic and demographic predictions of
who its population would be and what kind of lives they would lead. How will
future folk earn, travel, spend, play and recover from all their labours?
The Milton Keynes Development Corporation responded with an imaginarium
designed with our future selves in mind. The result is a paradoxical mix of
grand designs, practical compromises and significant follies. Drawing on nearly
50 years of Open University teaching and research, participants will explain
what it takes to imagine, orchestrate, govern and make a life in a place like
Milton Keynes.

Meanwhile, talking with Rebecca Davies about how we might
plan the activity brought to mind A Clockwork
Jerusalem, a show at British Pavilion we both saw in Venice, part of the
Architectural Biennial in 2014. The copy below are extracts from the catalogue
entry for the exhibition, which focused our thinking and directed some of the
conversations we had with audiences on the day:

…the industrial city combining traditions
of the romantic, sublime, and pastoral, to create new visions of British
society… looking backward and forwards, combining science fiction and
historicism to form ideological and aesthetic approaches to the contemporary
city… a product of the picturesque, of landscape, of narrative and of
pastoralism (ref. Capability Brown, Ruskin, Turner, Soane)... a product of the
industrial and the technological (ref. Brunel, Paxton, Spitfires)… showing
British Modernism as a unique and sometime surreal phenomenon… an obsession
with these interests written into the visions of this techno pastoralism that
span such diverse examples as the Garden Cities, 'non plan' and Milton
Keynes... exploring the late and last flowering or British radicalism, the
moment it was at its most socially, politically, and architecturally ambitious…
a moment (the 50s,60s & 70s) that also witnessed its collapse… a period
that sees both epic ambition and complete loss of nerve… grand utopian projects
(of that period) were a high point for a vision of society remade through
modern architecture… how these modern vision were absorbed into the popular
imagination, become sites of new imaginative speculation in the form of novels,
film and music (ref. Stone Henge, council estates, Ebenezer Howard, Cliff
Richard (!))… ruins and destructions, back-to-the-land rural fantasies…

As
we talked about the potential future exhibition, I displayed the pit fired
London clay objects we produced, together with others found on the Thames river
bed, into small collections. Hard it was to distinguish one group from the other -
their origin, history, use and meaning was being rewritten as we handled these.
This seemed a fertile starting point as we planned to show this body of work
and others in a new context. More about this in posts to come. Enjoy the images as you make your own mind as to what these objects are, and what inspired them...

Thursday, 22 June 2017

Craftspace kindly asked me to lead an
activity for their 30th anniversary celebration. I decided to
revisit something Eva Sajovic and
myself worked on for a Tate exchange event in March, part of the People’s
Bureau’s Unearthing
project - see previous posts for details including this one.

... a basic human need

I
thought I’d engage people in conversations rather than make something on this
occasion. The prompt was to have people hold hands, cupping them as if to hold
water and pour plaster in them. The time it took for the plaster to set was the
length of time participants were committed to talk to each other. The focus of
their conversations was a response to something I read to them, compiled from
interviews with audience members involved in Craftspace past projects and
questions of my own.

Below
and above are condensed transcripts of their conversations and pictures of some
of the casts. I’ll post the full transcript of the 30 conversations sometime
soon.